Lot 14: Andirons, c. 1790-1810, formerly the property of the Brooklyn Museum, sold by Brunk
When David Platzker first sent me the link to the Brooklyn Museum’s recent deaccession auction, I immediately thought of the phrase, “museum quality.” It has long been used by dealers to sell an object of such stature, manufacture, and significance that it should be—or at least could be—in a museum. How does it work, though, for objects that a museum sells off? Is “museum quality” only now for objects a museum wants to keep? Are these now pieces of “former museum quality”? “Some museum quality”? “Almost museum quality”? Brooklyn Museum Quality.
This all came to a head on the first page, when I saw Lot 14, this pair of Federal engraved andirons, estimated to sell for $400-600. Three is a trend, I thought, as I indexed these in my mind against the andiron that started it all—a photo of a lone andiron that turned out to be part of a pair, which was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1971 with an attribution to Paul Revere.
And the andirons sold by the Wolf Family last year that matched the Met’s in almost every physical detail, but which had an unbroken provenance and an origin and date that differed from the Met’s. What would these Brooklyn Museum andirons add to this situation, conceptually?
“one w/slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left, old repair/reinforcement to base”
Their date, 1790-1810, and manufacture, “American,” take us away from more specific understanding, not toward it. While they are of an identical type, they are different in enough details—the engraving the swaglessness, the flanges, the feet—that even an amateur andironologist would not suggest they were made by the same hands, the same shop, or even in the same town.
And then there’s the provenance. Though the auctioneer made careful note of the andiron’s physical condition—”one with slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left”? Who among us, amirite?—the only provenance information provided is the freshest: “Property of the Brooklyn Museum.” I mean, we can guess there’s no conservation history, but whatever object record, accession or donor data, or historical documentation the museum may have held for these andirons is not provided.
Someone clearly knew something, though. Because they paid $41,000 for these andirons, 100x their low estimate, and 5x the price of the perfectly provenanced Wolfs’. People are willing to pay for that Brooklyn Museum quality.
replica of Matisse’s Rosary Chapel in Vence installed at National Art Center Tokyo, via mon oncle
The exhibition, Henri Matisse: Forms in Freedom, at the National Art Center Tokyo includes a full-scale replica of la Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (1947-51). The experience incorporates simulated daylight on an accelerated loop, as if the replica stained glass windows were the ceiling of the mall at Caesar’s Palace.
photomural of Matisse’s tile Virgin & Child installed at National Art Center Tokyo, via mon oncle
In the caption Chie Sumiyoshi’s Mon Oncle article about the exhibit, it calls the above image a reproduction [再現] of a tile mural. But the only thing tiled here are the sheets of the photomural. The stained glass windows opposite, then, are also photos of the windows, and the wrought iron grates and landscaping behind them. Matisse’s candlesticks are on the replica altar, but Matisse’s crucifix is not.
Matisse’s Stations of the Cross in Vence, from a photo accompanying a 2013 review of a book by the longtime director of the Musée Matisse, in Architectural Review
I can find no images of a Tokyo replica of Matisse’s Stations of The Cross, which occupies the wall that would be directly next to the photographers of the images above. It is a tense and janky tangle that replaces a physical procession with a halting visual search for the next number and the next step. Matisse drew it at scale, with charcoal on the end of a bamboo pole. So the physical experience being replicated would have been not just that of a tourist, but of Matisse himself, standing in front of his work.
If I can find any relevant Brice Marden comments, or if someone gets married in there, I will update this post immediately.
Gerhard Richter, Engelskopf (Angel’s Head) [CR 48-7], 1963, also 1963/65, oil on linen? 68 x 72 cm, image via Gerhard Richter
I swear I will cut back on Gerhard Richter stanposting when Richter cuts back on wild things to stan.
While looking for examples of the way Richter considers his catalogue raisonné as a construct separate from a chronology, this painting caught my eye. Engelskopf, or Angel’s Head, [CR 48-7], is dated to 1963, where it comes after CR 13, CR 14 and CR 25-a, and is followed by CR 14-a and CR 15.
That 1963 date makes Engelskopf is one of the earliest photopaintings, but also one of the very first to include a caption text, which made Richter’s sourcing of reproduced images clear. It’s also Richter’s first art historical reference; except for Philipp Wilhelm, a painting of a newspaper clipping of a painted portrait, from 1964, it’ll be a long time before Richter directly references earlier artworks.
Constantin Brancusi, Muse, 1912, marble on original base, finally acquired by the Guggenheim in 1985, copyright claimed by ARS until at least Brancusi’s death+70, so 2027, I guess? idek
In 1971 sheriffs removed Brancusi’s Muse from the Guggenheim Museum, executing a 1969 court order that granted the sculpture to watch manufacturer Arde Bulova’s widow Ileana. Beginning in 1958, Mrs Bulova spent eleven years disputing her husband’s will, in which he left Muse to the museum. The couple had separated in 1955, soon after Ileana bid on Muse at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet—and Arde had paid for it. She successfully contended it was her property. Present at the seizure, Ileana told the New York Times she turned down a $200,000 offer from the Guggenheim, and would consider renting it to museums for a cut of the box office.
In 1981 Bulova sold Muse to Upper East Side art dealer Andrew Crispo for $800,000. His offer to flip it back to the museum was rejected. In the Fall of 1984 Crispo and a young security guard at Crispo’s gallery, Bernard Le Garos, lured a 28yo Canadian bartender to the gallery where they, along with three other men, bound, tortured, and sexually assaulted him for six hours.
That victim only came forward in the Spring of 1985, when he saw Le Garos on television, after his arrest for the murder of a 26yo Norwegian model and student named Eigil Dag Vesti. In February, Crispo and Le Garos had picked up Vesti, and while he was bound and masked, Le Garos shot him in the back of the head. They burned his body and abandoned it in the woods in Rockland County.
In the Fall of 1985, after Crispo pleaded guilty to tax evasion, the Guggenheim reacquired Muse from his creditors for $2 million. In December 1985, on the occasion of the sculpture’s return to public view, Guggenheim director Thomas M. Messer told Grace Glueck of the New York Times, “Obviously, it was very traumatic to have one of our central pieces removed from the museum under the guns of the deputy sheriffs and over our dead bodies.”
Constantin Brancusi, Muse, 1912, plaster, a gift of Walt Kuhn to the Guggenheim, who sold it to someone who sold it in 1986, where it was bought by someone who sold it in 2012.
In 1955 the Guggenheim had also been given a plaster version of Muse by Walt Kuhn, who acquired it from the 1913 Armory Show, which he helped organize. Reporting in 1985, Glueck was under the impression that the Guggenheim still owned that sculpture. But it turns out they had sold it privately to Harold Diamond in 1979, the year his 15-year-old son Mike co-founded a hardcore band called the Young Aborigines, and two years before they kicked out their drummer for being a girl and changed their name to the Beastie Boys. In November 1986, four days after License to Ill [original title:Don’t Be A F****t] was released, Muse turned up at Christie’s.
Though Le Garos said he’d murdered Vesti on Crispo’s orders, Crispo was never charged in the death. Though Le Garos corroborated the gallery assault victim’s account and pleaded guilty to kidnapping and torture, Crispo claimed it was all consensual, and was acquitted in 1988. Thanks to David Platzker, I learned today that Crispo died in February 2024, three weeks after Carl Andre.
detail from plate 4 of Cattelan: The 11th Commandment, published in 2024 by Three Star Books
After a thirteen-year gap in which the artist retired and unretired, Three Star Books, of Paris, has released a fourth volume in their Maurizio Cattelan trilogy, appropriately titled, The 11th Commandment.
Begun in 2007, each of the TSB books comprises an interview with the artist and one of his curator-collaborators, and images of recent works. This year it is Nancy Spector, who curated both Cattelan’s Guggenheim retrospective—prominently featured in the 2011 title, The Taste of Others—and the gold toilet vortex we’ve been swirling around in since 2015, otherwise known as America.
The interview is fine. The books continue to be remarkable because they are published in portfolio format, and each page is a facsimile of a hand-painted and hand-lettered watercolor original. The 11th Commandment is credited to Qi Han, whose renditions are comparable to previous editions, which were painted by Fu Site.
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2018, fresco, pine wood, steel, 343 x 693 x 242 cm, as installed in 2021 at UCCA in Shanghai
Above is the best one, conceptually. During Shanghai Fashion Week in 2018, Cattelan curated The Artist Is Present, at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, an exhibition for Gucci inspired by the idea that, “The copy is the original.” Cattelan included a work of his own in the show; Untitled (2018) is a 1:6-scale replica in fresco on wood of the Sistine Chapel. The image reproduced in The 11th Commandment, which includes a human figure for scale, was published on Gucci’s Facebook page. The only thing that would make Untitled better is if it were an edition.
Demian Diné Yazhi’s work in the Whitney Biennial, titled we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide+we must imagine liberation, flashes nine lines of revolutionary poetry out the window toward the Hudson River. When it blinks off, letters scattered across the three-part sculpture remain illuminated to spell “free palestine.”
Shoutout to Zach Feuer, who pointed it out to Annie Armstrong, whose Artnet report tipped off Zachary Small, who asked the curators about it, which was the first they’d heard of it.
At Little White Lies, Lillian Crawford has a Q&A with Hirokazu Kore-eda about working with Ryuichi Sakamoto on what would be the composer’s final film project, Monster [Kaibutsu]. Sakamoto ended up composing a couple of pieces for the soundtrack, and Kore-eda used some existing compositions, which are all so integral to the film, perhaps because he edited to them. The sonic experience of Monster is subtle and compelling, a mix of piano, diagetic musical instruments, and ambient/natural sounds. It really works as part of the whole.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Monster, which is an exquisite, precise, and wrenching film. When early reviews compared its multiple narrative views to Rashomon, I went back to rewatch, and it absolutely is not that.
As Kore-eda explains to Crawford, “One thing that’s consistent throughout this film is how hard it is to understand other people.” And that is in there. But I think Monster lays out the roots of that problem, by showing how trapped everyone is by their own subjective circumstances. Rashomon reveals the contradictions and lies people weave to suit their own selfish interest.
Monster shows how even a slightly different perspective, slightly different timing, can totally change the story. Some people have compared Monster to Kore-eda’s 2018 film, Shoplifters, for its emotional tenor—and overlaps in casting. It has made me think back to After Life (1998), in that both are enacted metaphors of filmmaking. Monster‘s events unfold unchanged each time, except for the position of the camera, or the timing of the cut, which changes the emotional impact and insight.
And the sonic texture of the film ends up being both an anchor and an amplifier as we—and the characters— try to piece things together.
It is at once extraordinary and the most logical thing in the world—admittedly, a low bar these days—but the Brooklyn Museum is selling two of its period rooms at auction next week. It’s actually selling much more, includingmostofthemajor—andminor— furnishingsofthoserooms, hundreds of other antiques, and woodwork elements from two other interiors. [Shoutout to David Platzker for the heads up on the sale.]
The most significant, or historic, or problematic, is now known as the Cane Acres Plantation dining room, which was the Brooklyn Museum’s largest period room, and the first from the South. The museum acquired it a hundred years ago near Summerville, South Carolina, in the middle of what turned out to be a museum period room arms race. Though it’ll be recognizable to anyone who’s been to the museum, what you’re actually bidding on is very different and specific:
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2002, acrylic on paper, 36×30 in., framed by the artist
I got to Josh Pazda Hiram Butler’s sales archive through an odd John Cage search, and I stayed for an unusual Cy Twombly find: a painting on newsprint—the Washington Post from April 5th, 2001, to be precise.
How did this? What is this? There are clear edges, plust some bleed; the acrylic shows no brushmarks, but does show the folds of the paper. It says framed by artist, but there’s also a bit of scorching right around the painted part, and the signature in the lower margin, like it was matted differently for a while?
Anyway, it turns out to be very similar to a work on, of all places, the Twombly Foundation’s own website, in the Prints section.
Untitled, 2002, monotype, 60 x 45 cm, image: Galerie Bastian via Cy Twombly Foundation
Described as a monotype, this work contains the same lozenge-shaped, leaf-like motif. It’s also on newsprint, and has borders very much like those kissed in place by the sun up top.
I think these are cardboard prints, where the image is carved into a sheet of cardboard with something rough, like a nail, and which are painted and pressed against a surface—in this case, straight up newspaper from the porch—to transfer the image.
Twombly made raw, scratchy monotypes right after getting back to New York in 1953, and in 1996, he revisited the cardboard engraving technique for an edition Twombly and Nicola Del Roscio printed for the Whitney Museum. Whether it was a pump-priming exercise, a diversion, a warm-up, or something else, this rough, disposable, DIY printing medium seems to have struck a chord with Twombly. At least it worked well enough to let these things out of the studio, conservators bedamned.
As reported today on social media, Ubu has stopped adding things.
“As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”
Preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety, except, of course, when it’s not:
“Everything is downloadable on UbuWeb. Don’t trust the cloud, even UbuWeb’s cloud,” said UbuWeb as recently as January.
And as Kenneth Goldsmith said as recently as yesterday, “Let’s keep UbuWeb well alive!” and “Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.”
A .tar of the site would be really handy right about now.
“Sold with a digital certificate of authentication from Tom Langevin, former director of Karl Springer, Ltd.” Lot 230: Karl Springer illuminated vanity mirror, c. 1970s, coll. Blackman Cruz via LA Modern
Ring lights are the cursed icon of our age. In the excavations in the future, ring lights on wispy black metal skeletal bases, flattened against a layer of disintegrated grey woodgrain laminate flooring, will be used to pinpoint this moment in history.
All the digital content they were used to create—that wasn’t already deleted from the servers when the monetization ran out—will have been wiped from the servers by EMPs, and archaeologists will hypothesize what they were for, and why every 21st century room had one. Was that just the shape of lamps at that point? The moon was popular, I guess? Were they altars to the Oprah goddess?
Then one day a dig in the Cahuenga Archipelago will turn up this, a ring light WITH A MIRROR IN THE CENTER, and yet it dates from generations earlier. And they’ll conclude that ringlights were once used for an ancient habit of staring at oneself. And at some point in the intervening 50 years, probably because they were processing the looming climate crisis, people became so unconcerned with how they looked that ring lights lost the mirror, but kept the shape, purely as an aesthetic. Maybe they even became symbols of a new humility, a communitarian absence of self-obsession. What an enlightened and advanced society the Ring Light Culture must have been. Why they died out was a mystery.
It would be weird and unsettling to get a letter from someone who killed his wife, is something I have thought about but never had to deal with personally.
The envelope containing Carl Andre’s letter to Coco Fusco in June 1993 (photo Coco Fusco/Hyperallergic)
In unrelated news, last night Hyperallergic published an account by artist Coco Fusco of the time in 1993 Carl Andre wrote her a letter. Fusco had published an essay in a Mexico City art magazine about Ana Mendieta’s art and her complex and groundbreaking relationship to Cuba. Andre wrote to Fusco c/o the magazine:
He marked his letter “personal and confidential,” put a copyright sign on it, and ended it with “for your eyes only,” as if to say, don’t even think of showing this to anybody. For years, I was too afraid to mention the letter in public, imagining that he might take revenge. I had heard plenty of scary stories about Mr. Andre from Mendieta’s close friends. I had never met him, but I knew he was a famous White male artist who might also be a murderer.
Now that Andre is dead, Fusco describes the letter’s contents, her experience, and the art context of Mendieta’s work, as well as the broader Cuban artist community, and willful misperceptions of it. But because of the copyright/eyes only thing, she still doesn’t publish or reproduce it.
If she wants to publish it, maybe she should put it up for sale.
Last summer and fall, a weird and unsettling collection of dozens of postcards from Carl Andre came up for auction in Chicago. One lot was all postcards of Andre’s own art; another was postcards of other art. It was immediately unsettling that the correspondent had the same initials as Andre’s wife. But that was surpassed by the timeline that spanned many years, but which concentrated on the years after Mendieta’s death, and Andre’s trial for her murder. So during all that, while he sat silent in court, Andre kept up lively conversations and shared his poetic ruminations through the mail.
I spent a little time last year trying to make some sense of these postcards, and to see who might be on the other end of them. I dropped it, partly because it became clear that some of it was related to correspondence art, or chain letters, of sending postcards on to the next person in a chain. Whoever got in the chain next to Andre may have kept up a side conversation. One outlier lot included some correspondence to Andre, as if they sent one letter back and forth. But it also mentions Andre’s shocked rudeness when his longtime postcard friend introduced himself IRL at an opening. It was the early 90s equivalent of a tumblr mutual showing up at your office. And you’d been acquitted of killing your wife.
Anyway, Andre’s signature on all these postcards is a C around an a, which means he must have hated the @ sign takeover. But it does look a little like a copyright.
Édouard Manet, Amandes Vertes, 1871, 21 x 26 cm, RW142
Researching some stuff on Manet and politics for an essay, I got stuck on this aside from Beth Archer Brombert’s 1996 biography, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat: through 1871 and the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, the Paris Commune and its violent defeat and repercussions, Manet, Archer Brombert writes, “seemed unable to regain his equilibrium.”
In Paris in the aftermath, the only thing he managed to paint that Fall was a small (21 x 26 cm) still life of a pile of unripe almonds. Which turns out to be nearly identical to a detail of a still life he’d painted three years earlier. “As writers have been known to copy earlier pages of their own work or that of others just to get started again,” Archer Brombert explains/confesses, Manet copied himself. Then she goes a bit big: “Still lifes played an important role in Manet’s life; they distracted him when he was low and kept his hand and eye in practice…he turned to still lifes in moments of distress.”
ngl, I would’ve copied the knife. or the wonky vase: Édouard Manet, Fruits sur une table, 1864, 45 x 73.5 cm, collection Musée d’Orsay
[note: Archer Brombert cites Manet biographer Adolphe Tabarant for the date and interpretation of this painting. The Wildenstein Manet CR dates this painting to 1869, which would kind of wipe out this reading. The painting I think Manet’s said to have copied from, known in the CR as Fruits (RW 83), and at the Musée d’Orsay as Fruits sur une table, is actually dated to 1864, and was shown in Paris in 1865 and 1867. Not sure how this gets solved, unless the Amandes Vertes finally comes out of hiding and shows itself.]
The inauguration of Gerhard Richter BIRKENAU, a permanent exhibition in a purpose-built, VW-funded pavilion at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim, Poland, opened on 9 February 2024, the artist’s 92nd birthday. via mdsm.pl
Last month Gerhard Richter BIRKENAU, a permanent exhibition in a purpose-built pavilion, was opened at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim, the Polish town near the nazi death camp that took its name. It contains reproductions of the Sonderkommando photos that Richter used as a basis for the Birkenau series of large-scale squeegee paintings [CR 937/1-4] he made in 2014. [Two photos are visible on the concrete walls below.] It also includes full-scale Diasec-mounted versions of the Birkenau paintings [a medium Richter once used for a category he called “Facsimile Objects,” but which he later replaced with “Prints”]. And facing them are Facsimile Objects of a series of four Grey Mirror paintings. Photos of oil-on-glass paintings printed and Diasec face-mounted with acrylic on aluminum.
Mrs. Moritz-Richter, et al., at the inauguration of Gerhard Richter BIRKENAU, via mdsm.pl
In this Guardian article [shoutout greg.org hero/reader Claudio for the heads up] Agata Pyzik tries to put a market–or at least a marketing—critique on Richter’s use of photo copies of paintings, even while acknowledging his attempts to remove his Birkenau works from an art market context. [Richter’s kept the paintings in his foundation, and put the other facsimile edition in the Reichstag.]
Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR 955], 2018, his last painting (so far), installed with Birkenau and Birkenau Facsimile Objects and Birkenau photos at the Met Breuer in 2020
I read the Birkenau facsimiles, which he has shown alongside the Birkenau paintings from the jump, including at the Met Breuer in 2020, as an attempt to head off any sacralization of the paintings themselves. He did not make them to be, and he does not want them to become icons of the Holocaust. Even worse for him, I think, would be being seen as attempting to iconize or exploit these terrible photographs, to turn them to his own use. He sees limits to his own project of painting in relation to images and history, and he’s not wrong.
Gerhard Richter, Grey Mirror [CR 751/1-4], 1991, each 300 x 175 cm., portrait-style, paint and enamel on glass, a gift of the artist to the Saint Louis Art Museum, with three giant squeegee diptychs, November, December & January, which the museum bought in 1990, visible in reflection.
But while all the media attention is on the Birkenau pictures, the most unsettling and powerful element of the installation, the mirrors, barely gets a mention. If this were any other work, any other place, any other time, the fact that Richter made Facsimile Objects of mirror paintings would be enough to keep me going for weeks. These happen to be facsimiles of Grey Mirror [CR 751/1-4], a series of 3 x 1.75 m, color-coated glass paintings made in 1991 for—and by—the St Louis Art Museum, a gift with purchase. [The purchase was Betty.] In Oświęcim, Richter has turned them sideways, and installed them landscape-style, as one continuous 12-meter mirror panorama.
But these are there, and now.
And so visitors to Oświęcim, while flanked on either side by direct photographic evidence of the nazi genocide at Birkenau as documented by its targets, will see reflections of themselves and everyone else with their backs turned to a repetition of Birkenau which looms behind them. It’s at least theoretically possible, if previously inconceivable, that if he opened an exhibition in Germany that made visitors look in a mirror while turning away from the evidence of genocide all around them, Richter could be arrested.
[update: After corresponding with the artist’s studio about broken links on the webpage for this exhibition, I was informed that this mirror work is actually an “exhibition copy” of Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR955], and not [CR751/1-4]. Which means the dimensions and material aspect of this object are still to be confirmed. For now the artist’s site still describes them as Diasec-mounted prints. Is that whan an exhibition copy of a mirror work is? Or would it be a similarly produced enamel paint on the back of glass? Perhaps we shall see.
Installation view of the Birkenau paintings and photos reflected in Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR955] at Gerhard Richter: 100 Works for Berlin, at the Neue Nationalgalerie thru 2026, a video still by Julius-Christian Schreiner via DW
What is significant, though, and has been unremarked by anyone, is that with these mirrors, the BIRKENAU installation replicates the current long-term installation of the Birkenau paintings, the Birkenau photos, and Grauer Spiegel (4 Parts) [CR955], at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. So viewers in Germany can, in fact, see themselves in a mirror, with the genocide of Birkenau represented behind and all around them, know that this same situation exists somewhere else right now, and contemplate the differences between an original and a repetition.]
